Possible Wrestler’s Grave Found in Aspendos, Turkey

Turkish archaeologists just opened a 2,400-year-old grave that came stocked with an athlete’s calling card, coins stamped with wrestlers. Whether the person buried there actually competed is a separate question entirely.

A Tomb in a Newly Found Cemetery

Archaeologists discovered the burial in a previously unknown cemetery in the eastern part of Aspendos, an ancient Greco-Roman city in southern Turkey’s Pamphylia region, about 10 miles inland from the Mediterranean. Turkey’s Minister of Culture and Tourism, Mehmet Nuri Ersoy, announced the find, describing a sarcophagus-type tomb built from stone slabs and dated to the last quarter of the 5th century BC through the 4th century BC, placing it within Aspendos’s Classical period. Inside, the team found a single skeleton along with several coins and other grave goods.

Coins With a Civic Meaning

The coins depict two naked wrestlers grappling, a design Aspendos minted on its own silver coinage, known as staters, for well over a century. Numismatist Oğuz Tekin of Koç University, writing in a 2000 study, argued that the long production run of this design suggests wrestling carried real civic significance for the city, not just casual popularity. Ersoy said the combination of these coins with other artifacts in the tomb points to the deceased having some connection to sport, possibly as a wrestler himself.

A City Built Around Sport

Aspendos had the infrastructure to back up that connection. The Greek colonists who founded the city in the 5th century BC built it into a prosperous trading hub for salt, olive oil, timber, and horses, and it grew to include a large gymnasium and a stadium constructed in the 2nd century AD that could seat as many as 8,000 spectators for footraces, javelin contests, and wrestling matches. Archaeological evidence from the earlier Classical period, when this particular tomb dates to, has been comparatively limited, which is part of why officials consider this find significant.

Why the Coins Aren’t Enough on Their Own

Sarah E. Bond, a historian at the University of Iowa who wasn’t involved in the excavation, urged caution about jumping to conclusions. She told Live Science that coins alone cannot indicate this was a Classical-era Greek wrestler, since Aspendos’s wrestler-stamped staters were minted in large numbers and used as everyday currency by the entire population, not exclusively by athletes. Bond said stronger evidence, such as signs of a broken and healed nose on the skeleton itself, a common injury among wrestlers, would be needed before researchers could confidently identify the person as an athlete. Further skeletal and archaeological analysis is ongoing.

Sources

This report draws on original coverage by Live Science, citing statements from Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism and comments from historian Sarah E. Bond.